Scots culture to be cut from a broader cloth

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ONE OF the mostly politically sensitive documents to be drawn up by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum was launched this week, under the title The School Curriculum and the Culture of Scotland.

An earlier report by the council's own review group, Scottish Culture and the Curriculum, was completed last June but never published. A furore blew up, as its author, the former SCCC assistant director Robbie Robertson, accused his bosses of political suppression amid fears of nationalism. Even the title of the new document was seen as a dilution of the review group's findings.

The report that has emerged this week is less a dilution, more a new direction. "We have taken a less traditional view of culture, and widened it to include economics and business issues," said Neil Galbraith, chairman of the curriculum council and the original review group, and self-styled "bridge between the two".

The revised paper seeks to broaden the idea of Scottishness. There is new emphasis on teaching about sustainable economic growth and enterprise, and a call for citizenship, which looms large in Government thinking south of the border, to be "embedded" in the curriculum.

Gone is the earlier "statement of entitlement" under which pupils could expect to be given a knowledge of Scotland as "a nation with distinctive cultural characteristics", though it appears at the back with a summary of the review group's findings.

Mr Robertson said: "This is a fabrication which ducks the real issues. Any proposals it has on young people's understanding of political processes or the environment are postponed to what it calls the medium-long term."

Nospic3txt Home economics is a problem area, but pupils at Shawlands Academy, Glasgow, show a multicultural flair in redesigning old clothes

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